international

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt The closing line of my recent blog post asked:  "Is even democracy a luxury for the poor?" Shortly after writing it, I came across this quote by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, featured in the obituary of Senator Robert C. Byrd who died last week.  Regarding the vast federal aid that Byrd garnered for West Virginia over the years, Rockefeller said Byrd knew that “before you can make life better, you have to have a road to get in there, and you have to have a sewerage system.” This comment resonated with me, struck me as accurate.  Yet it ran counter to my thinking about Robert C. Byrd for the past few decades.  While I have always considered Byrd a fine man (well, aside from his Klan membership as a younger man) and appreciated his dedication to the Senate, I saw him primarily as a poster child for the excesses of pork barrel politics.  Rarely was he in the news, it seems, without some mention of the federal aid he was able to channel to West Virginia.  Indeed, his obituary in the New York Times states that he built, "always with canny political skills, a modern West Virginia with vast amounts of federal money."  Elsewhere, it includes this quote from Senator Byrd himself, “I lost no opportunity to promote funding for programs and projects of benefit to the people back home.”  He referred to West Virginia as "one of the rock bottomest of states."